Discussions on the history and historiography of Australia's New England

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

The early Aboriginal peopling of Australia's New England


Neanderthal cousins: Artists reconstruction of a Denisovan girl based on the combination of skeletal and DNA evidence.

In April, I began a sort series of Armidale Express columns on the history of the Aboriginal peopling of New England. Drawn from the introductory course I was running on the history of New England, the columns told in short form the story of the journey to and arrival on the mega-continent now known as Sahul, the spread across Sahul and arrival in New England followed by the challenge of the Last Glacial Maximum.

Aboriginal settlement of Sahul: by 40,000 years ago, the ancestors of Australia's Aboriginal peoples had occupied the entire continent known as Sahul.
In a later series I will carry the story forward through the Holocene and the golden age that came to an end with the arrival of the Europeans in 1788.

I have now posted all the columns to this blog. This post allows you to follow the whole series through from the first post. 




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